What are you reading?

I refuse to call this thread "Anything Book" because I'm stubborn. I encourage you all to include links to wiki articles or amazon pages or whatnot.

A character idea for a story I'm writing lead me to getting a copy of The Man Without Qualities, which I fully expected to read dry/obtuse/etc. and so far have been pleasantly wrong about. Granted, I only read about 10 pages so far of what's about 3,000 pages, so....https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Without_Qualities

I ALSO read "Ancillary Justice" by Anne Leckie. This is a really fun sci fi novel told from the perspective fo a starships AI that spans multiple bodies and locations. The book starts and drops you right in the middle of the universe. It's a series, so I'm excited to pick up the next books.

I'm reading, on and off, a translation of the Iliad so the girls will think I'm a man of culture.

"It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals."

I ALSO read "Ancillary Justice" by Anne Leckie. This is a really fun sci fi novel told from the perspective fo a starships AI that spans multiple bodies and locations. The book starts and drops you right in the middle of the universe. It's a series, so I'm excited to pick up the next books.

Seconded on the recommendation for Ancillary Justice.

MB would you like to hear my opinion on Sword & Mercy, or do you want to go in w/ nothing but your current momentum.

"It is entirely seemly for a young man killed in battle to lie mangled by the bronze spear. In his death all things appear fair. But when dogs shame the gray head and gray chin and nakedness of an old man killed, it is the most piteous thing that happens among wretched mortals."

In the way that the experience of transcendental beauty combined with simultaneous sorrowful awareness of the fleetingness of ephemeral beauty and the inevitability of death makes me randy, baby, yeah baby, yeah.

I am re-reading "The Road" by Cormack McCarthy. I also just picked up "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Kahneman. I've only just started the latter, but I can recommend the former, especially to fathers/parents.

I am re-reading "The Road" by Cormack McCarthy. I also just picked up "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Kahneman. I've only just started the latter, but I can recommend the former, especially to fathers/parents.

Is this your first McCarthy novel? I haven't read The Road, but I read No Country For Old Men and Blood Meridian and really like both books.

I've been reading this guy's books since he started writing and I always enjoy them enough to keep buying. They're pretty much just regular type fantasy novels but they have good characters and original worlds and magic systems and story lines that are good enough to keep me picking them up. He does seem to keep getting better. I'm not like wholeheartedly recommending them but if you can't find anything else to read one of his books might be worth a try. Also his first name is #1.

I would be reading Star Wars: X-Wing: Mercy Kill if I wasn't so stressed out that even this light and entertaining book were too much for my brain to handle at the moment. I started it a few month ago, but haven't finished it yet, although I really enjoyed it.

I'm reading the third book in the Culture series right now. Use Of Weapons. It's... I don't know. It's kinda an impenetrable mess of a narrative. This series isn't turning out to be what I expected, for some reason.

The first book had its weaknesses, but there were so many great bits, and so much promise for future stories. The second was a decent, simple story, but with fewer great bits, and it started to suggest that maybe additional stories wouldn't build on the promise of the first, wouldn't explore new ground, introduce as many new ideas, etc. I was partly hoping that each book would leap forward in time (and civilizational progress), or examine opinions of the Culture from other species and cultures, as the first one did. Or whatever. But by book three, I have a sinking feeling that each book may just be a narrowly focused, character-driven story about some particular incident. That doesn't sound bad in theory, but the character writing is not the strength of the books. What's good, what intrigues, is the relative power and scale and technological and cultural progress of the species. Not a story about a sad violent man doing I Don't Know What Yet 200 Pages In as the book constantly flashes back to out-of-context scenes from his past.

Anyway, I'll see how this one finishes. I'm not done w/ the series yet by any means.

I just finished Amateur by Thomas Page McBee - a short piece by a trans-man on learning to box and trying to understand masculinity and violence. I quite enjoyed the relative outsider's perspective on it.

I've also been reading The City and the City by China Mieville and so far I've been kinda bored by it? The whodunnit aspect is not particularly compelling and the world-building around the split city just seems to be a frustrating exercise in cognitive dissonance.

Originally Posted by saberopus

I'm reading the third book in the Culture series right now. Use Of Weapons. It's... I don't know. It's kinda an impenetrable mess of a narrative. This series isn't turning out to be what I expected, for some reason.

I wasn't a big fan of Use of Weapons either though it seems to be a lot of people's favourite book in the series.

If you like the cultural interactions then Look to Windward is pretty good and loosely continues on from Consider Phlebas. I personally really enjoyed Excession which is told largely from the point of view of the god-like AIs running the whole show and has a good sense of humour.

I wasn't a big fan of Use of Weapons either though it seems to be a lot of people's favourite book in the series.

If you like the cultural interactions then Look to Windward is pretty good and loosely continues on from Consider Phlebas. I personally really enjoyed Excession which is told largely from the point of view of the god-like AIs running the whole show and has a good sense of humour.

Nice, thanks! Yeah, the prologue of Consider Phlebas highlights the incredible capabilities of the Minds, and I was excited to hear more about that, later. Glad to hear he gets into it (and other things), because Player of Games and Use of Weapons both feel relatively mundane in terms of speculative technological/cultural stuff. I was just hoping that the series wasn't like:

Book 1: Introduces and teases the ambiguous motivations, advanced technological mastery, and the cultural idiosyncrasies of the Culture.

Books 2-?: Takes all that as a given, introduces few new ideas, and just tells personal stories of humans set in that universe.

I think it extends the learning process when children immediately get stomped on by "adults" when they say something that's not quite perfect. It causes them to react defensively and next thing you know something is brewing. I think it was a lot easier to grow up when you spent the majority of your time socializing with people close to your own age and then the rest of your time with your own family.

Currently I'm reading the 1977, and 2012 English translation of Roadside Picnic. It is one of my favorites and both translations have very subtle differences, like the 2012 version being full of f-bombs while the 1977 version not having any, which begs the question if it was censorship back then, or an attempt to make the modern translation more edgy.

Hey, I bought the 2012 translation a few weeks ago, been meaning to check it out when I have a gap between books. So it is noticeably different than the older one? It's been quite a while since I read it, so I'm not sure I'll notice, but it's interesting that it's evident to you. I really hope they weren't trying to... make the translation more edgy? That seems like it'd be a very strange decision for a translator to make.